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On December 3rd and 4th, 2004, the Computer Science Department at Indiana University hosted a conference to celebrate Daniel P. Friedman's 60th birthday. The DanFest web page has the program, links to some of the papers, and photos.

Dan Friedman, of course, is a CS professor at Indiana and an influential programming language researcher and teacher, best known to a wider audience as the lead author of EOPL, used in many PL courses. Who do you get to speak at a conference in honor of the author of a book so famous it is recognizable by its acronym? Why, the authors of the other famous acronymized books in the same field, of course, such as SICP, HTDP, and TSPL.

The keynote address, "Dan Friedman: Cool Ideas", was delivered by Guy Steele, and the star-studded program included authors of the above books, and many previous students of Friedman's. An article in the Indiana student newspaper provides some of Friedman's perspective on the event.

The speaker list also included a couple of (semi-)regular LtU'ers, Oleg Kiselyov and Kevin Millikin (did I miss anyone?) My thanks to Oleg for prompting me to post this.

The November 2004 edition of the biannual Haskell Communities and Activities Report has been published. Lots of new stuff in the last six months, and some old stuff updated as well. The HC&AR has been steadily growing over the last three years, showing that FP is gaining users both professional and private.

Several of the HC&AR items are interesting enough to have their own LtU stories, which may appear shortly.

Over the past decade, researchers have found context-sensitive term-rewriting
semantics to be powerful and expressive tools for modeling programming languages,
particularly in establishing type soundness proofs. Unfortunately, developing such semantics
is an error-prone activity. To address that problem, we have designed PLT Redex,
an embedded domain-specific language that helps users interactively create and
debug context-sensitive term-rewriting systems. We introduce the tool with a series of
examples and discuss our experience using it in courses and developing an operational
semantics for R5RS Scheme.

Seems like a nice tool (it's DrScheme based, of course). I guess I should try it out.

I would like to remind you of MOZ 2004, the Mozart/Oz conference, whose submission deadline is coming up quickly (normally July 9, but due to several requests we will probably extend it by one week). The conference will be held on October 7-8 in Charleroi, Belgium. Highly recommended if you want to get the latest scoop on what is going on in the Mozart/Oz community. Many Mozart researchers and developers will attend too, and we expect lots of animated discussions. We'll also have two very interesting invited speakers, Gert Smolka and Mark Miller.

Another point that might interest people is that we've put a full set of lecture slides (more than 1000) on the CTM Web site (click on Supplements). The slides were made by Christian Schulte and Seif Haridi. The course is rather nontraditional. It might even be viewed as heretical in some quarters (we dare introduce concurrency before state, and we don't even mention inheritance). But we think it's a good way to start learning programming. The lecture slides only cover one third of the book, though, so if you want to see the other two thirds you'll have to get the book.